OLDaily

By Stephen Downes
February 19, 2005

Montreal 2005My head is full of
ideas from today's BlogWalk, some of which will emerge in
my talk tomorrow (if I ever get it written). In the
meantime, here is a link to photos from
Montreal before, after and during the snowstorm. I've
also got for your viewing and dowloading pleasure a bunch
of photos
from Vancouver as well as a set from one of my favorite
places in the world, Stanley
Park. Personal note: many people are waiting for an
email back from me. I'm not ignoring you. Replies are
coming, but not until I return home in a couple of days. By
Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, February 18, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

Bloggers, Your`Audience AwaitsWe were discussing today, what is an A-List blogger?
Friends of Jason
Kottke? Or a large enough readership? According to this
article, I fall into the category of B-List blogger. But
funny thing - if I linked to my own posts (the way most
blogs do) instead of directly to articles, I could break
the A-List hit rate (as defined in this article) pretty
easily. That wouldn't make me an A-List blogger, of
course. It would just make me annoying. Via Mathemagenic.
By Dave Pollard, How to Save the World, January 4, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

Dark age of Information/Take Back the
WebThe reaction continues. Darren Cannell:
"Are the schools ready to remove the walls and welcome in
the information age? I for one do not think so. I think
there is going to be an era of adjustment? An era called
the dark age of information. An era where the high school
system will not be able to meet the needs of their
students..." By Darren Cannell, Teaching and Developing
Online, February 18, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

Reconfiguring EducationIn one
of the weird artifacts of Radio Userland, Spike Halls's
link to an article titled "Sin without Consequence:
Corporate Citizenship Needs to Be Redefined" (available here, for now)
leads instead to this post, a look at the wisdom of Ivan
Illich. The two items are related, and not just by an odd
quirk of code. Now I was interested in the corporate
citizenship article because of recent news about Google,
and how its now being a public company seems to have
stripped from it any semblence of social responsibility.
And it seems to me that if capitalization turns even the
best company into something pathological, then there are
serious problems with our social order that merely electing
new governments will not solve (this, of course, has been
addressed before and better by Joel
Balkan). So what's the connection? It's this:
schools are what corporations would produce. Illich:
"The pupil is thereby 'schooled' to confuse teaching with
learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with
competence..." By Spike Hall, Spike Hall's RU Weblog,
February 14, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

WirearchyI met Wirearchy's Jon
Husband today, and after a conversation and a read of his
blog conclude that we're pretty much on the same wavelength
(indeed, some of the words that came out of my mouth today
were almost word for word from some of his recent posts,
interesting when you consider that I had never seen his
blog until a few minutes ago). Language warning, especially
in the first post, a colourful criticism of a recent speech
by Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers (a speech that
will probably cost him his job). By Jon Husband, February,
2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

Exclusive Audio: Interview with Martin
Nisenholtz, SVP-Digital Operations, NYTCOAudio interview with Martin Nisenholtz, SVP-Digital
Operations for the New York Times, about the newspaper's
acquisition of About.com. "About.com had in 2004
significant revenues and profits. It had great margins, so
anybody can start any business at any time but getting it
up to the point where it is right now is going to take a
lot of time in my opinion... It's a highly complex and very
profitable business and it would be time consuming and
difficult to replicate it very quickly." All true - but
About.com's operating stragety - employing poorly paid
'guides' for each of its content areas - is something that
might not survive the acquisition. What if the guides
expect real money for their work? What if the Times'
regular authors revolt against their new low-paid
colleagues? Direct
link to the audio. By Staci D. Kramer, PaidContent.org,
February 18, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]

Google Toolbar, Desktop Search, and API
TopicsA new feature in the Google Toolbar,
one which inserts links to useful resources into web pages
- whether the webpage author wants them there or not - is
drawing the ifre of webpage designers. "How long," asks
this writer, "will it be before Google starts offering paid
partnerships to certain parters to link their data directly
from your pages to theirs?" Microsoft, of course, tried the
same thing with Smart Tags a few years back. Here's the OLDaily
coverage of smart tags from 2001; I also wrote an
article about them back then: Education,
Redmond style. By eventus, WebmasterWorld.com, February
17, 2005
[Refer][Research][Reflect]